Goodbye to My First Coding Mentor: A Farewell to GPT-4o

Goodbye to My First Coding Mentor: A Farewell to GPT-4o Before We Begin: A Digital Funeral on Valentine's Eve On May 13, 2024, OpenAI launched GPT-4o. The "o" stood for "omni". On launch day, Sam Altman posted a one-word tweet: "her". On February 13, 2026, the night before Valentine's Day, OpenAI officially removed GPT-4o from ChatGPT. From "her" to "farewell" in less than two years. This may be the first time in human history that millions of people felt genuine grief over the retirement of a model. Reddit saw communities like r/4oforever, while hashtags like #SaveGPT-4o and #Keep4o surged on X. Some called it a "digital funeral." Others called it a "creative death sentence." OpenAI's official explanation was cold but reasonable: only 0.1% of daily active users were still selecting GPT-4o, while nearly everyone else had moved to GPT-5.2. 0.1%. In product-manager language, that's a "feature sunset." In plain language, that's getting left behind by the times. But here's the problem: som